Copulation

In all cultures copulation has a special binary status, being viewed alternatively as sacred and profane, depending on context. The process gives man access to divine life-giving powers, but via basic animal functions, thus uniting the two aspects of humanity’s dualistic nature. Yeats’s observation that “Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of Excrement” (from “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”) is a poetic rendering of the stark Latin inter urinas et faeces nascimur (“We are born between urine and feces”), quoted by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930, 78). Historically, English terms for copulation have come to be regarded as obscene and therefore highly taboo, forming a potent element in swearing and profanity. Their public use is still regarded as unacceptable and highly controversial in all speech communities, despite exploitation in various forms of popular culture. In this respect English differs from other languages, for example French, in which the verbs of copulation, foutre and baiser , are in common currency.

The public status of these terms has varied. Curiously, English has had three basic terms for copulation in its historical development, all of disputed origin and all at some time regarded as taboo. In consequence, enormous numbers of euphemisms and synonyms have grown up. The earliest and least-known term was the verb sard , recorded from Anglo-Saxon times to the seventeenth century; it coexisted with swive , recorded from medieval times to the Renaissance, but thereafter with diminishing frequency. The origins of swive are in Anglo-Saxon swífan , “to revolve,” also “to sweep,” although sexual instances are hard to trace. Sard has the notable distinction of being the only word in the field used in formal contexts. Both sard and swive have now been archaic for over a century. The modern term fuck is recorded only from the early sixteenth century. All the early recorded instances are from the North, and several of them are found in flytings or swearing matches, a form of entertainment carried on, surprisingly, by the Scottish nobility and literati. Since then it has had an underground or disreputable currency, although some authors have tried to rehabilitate it.

Swive in its clear sexual sense is first recorded in the Canterbury Tales (1386–1400), when the Miller ends his bawdy tale of adultery with this coarse summary:

Thus swyved was the carpenteres wyf,
For al his keping and his ialousye
[In spite of all his watchfulness and suspicion].
(ll. 666-67)

Although Chaucer apologizes in advance for the Miller’s tale as being that of a cherle or low-class person, swyve is found in a variety of contexts. In a fifteenth-century verse a magpie vows to reveal an affair, using a medieval oath into the bargain:

A, seyde the pye, by Godes wylle,
How thou art swyved y [I] shalle telle.

John Florio’s A Worlde of Wordes (1598), the first comprehensive English/Italian dictionary, translated the relevant Italian verb via the whole gamut of available English synonyms with Renaissance exuberance:

Fottere: To iape [jape], to sard, to fucke, to swive, to occupy.

We notice that out of this extensive word field, only one term has survived into Modern English in the copulatory sense. Most of the recorded instances of swive are scurrilous: John Fletcher’s translation of a passage of Martial, published in 1656, carries the line: “I can swive four times a night; but thee once in four years I cannot occupye” (xi 98). Eric Partridge cited in 1937 the naughty title of The Queen of Swiveland for Venus. However, the word was never as taboo as fuck , being included in the dictionaries of Nathaniel Bailey (1730), Francis Grose (1785), and the great Oxford English Dictionary (1884–1928). But during the nineteenth century its currency started to peter out, ending with this piece of quasi-medical Victorian advice: “Don’t bathe on a full stomach, nor swive” (1898). Throughout its history the term stayed semantically stable and did not develop related idioms such as swive about or swive off!

Sard , as has been mentioned, is an ancient word found in formal contexts in Anglo-Saxon, such as the translation of St. Matthew 5:27 (“Do not commit adultery”) in the Lindisfarne Gospels as: “Ne serð ?u oðres mones wif.” By the medieval period sard was being used in less elevated contexts. The character of Gluttony in the morality play The Castle of Perseverance (ca. 1425) urges Mankind to be “serðyn gay gerlys,” which would approximate to “screwing good-time girls” (l. 1163). Before it died out it became a fairly rare regional word found more in the North: “Go, teach your grandam [grandmother] to sard” was “a Nottingham proverb,” according to Howell’s English Proverbs , dated 1617. Its existence in a proverb shows that the word was not then taboo.

“To jape” meant both "to play and “to deceive,” but the sexual sense surfaces in the anonymous Political Poems (1382) in this shockingly Oedipal comment: “Sle thi fadre and jape thi modre and they will thee assoile” (“Kill your father and fuck your mother, and they will forgive you,” I, 270). A late medieval extract from the play Hyckescorner (1510) runs: “he japed my wife and made me cuckold” (i 171). A pointed comment on the word’s semantic change was made by George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589): “Such wordes as may be drawen to a foule and unshamefast sense, as one that should say to a young woman, ‘I pray you let me jape with you, which is indeed no more than let me sport with you’ … for it may be taken in another perverser sense” (Book III, chapter 22). Thereafter the sexual sense faded away as the modern meaning established itself.

The sexual sense of occupy provides an even stronger example of how one meaning can affect the general currency of a word. The primary sense of “to take possession of; take for one’s own use or seize” is recorded from about 1380. However the sexual sense of “to copulate” ( OED 8) appeared about 1432 in this amusing passage from Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon: “Men of Lacedemonia [Sparta], fatigate and weary through the compleyntes of their wifes beenge at home, made a decre and ordinaunce that they sholde occupye mony men, thenkenge the nowmbre of men to be encreesed by that.” An explicit comment on the semantic deterioration of the word is found in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II (1597), ironically in the mouth of Doll Tearsheet: “as odious as the word ‘occupy’, which was an excellent word before it was ill sorted” (II iv 159). The contemporary dramatist Ben Jonson noted in his Discoveries (1637): “Many, out of their own obscene Apprehensions, refuse proper and fit words, as occupie, nature , and the like.” The comment in the Oxford English Dictionary bears this out: “The disuse of this verb in the 17th and most of the 18th c. is notable…. This avoidance appears to be due to its vulgar employment in sense 8.” This sexual sense is last recorded in 1660.

In common with other word fields dealing with the genitalia and excretion, the taboo has generated a great number of euphemisms, as well as a division of registers between the coarser native words and classical terms. Thus copulation itself (first used in the sexual sense ca. 1632) and intercourse (from ca. 1798) have histories similar to occupy , but now have primary sexual meanings. Conversation meant “adultery” from ca. 1511, surviving in the formula criminal conversation subsequently abbreviated in legal jargon to crim. con ., recorded from 1809, but now obsolete. In addition to the euphemistic phrase to sleep with , discussed under Euphemisms, is cover , now confined to agricultural contexts, but first recorded as an official euphemism in 1535 in Act 27 Henry VIII c. 6. It appears grossly in Shakespeare’s Othello (I i 111) and pompously in Sir Thomas Urquhart’s delightful translation of Rabelais (1653): “Madam, it would be a very great benefit to the commonwealth, delightful to you, honourable to your progeny, and necessary for me, that I cover you for the propagating of my race” (Book II, chapter 21).

The field contains a huge variety of slang terms, like modern screw, shag, hump , and bonk , several of them of surprising duration. Thus the copulatory sense of screw is first recorded in the New Canting Dictionary (1725), but then seemingly dropped out of usage until it was revived about 1937. Shag is similarly first found in Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) but had an apparent hiatus of usage until the 1950s. Grose also includes hump , noting that it was “once a fashionable word for copulation.” Bonk is an exclusively modern British word, recorded in the sexual sense from the 1950s. Jonathon Green’s Slang Thesaurus (2nd edition, 1999) has approximately two hundred such terms.

In many ways the division of registers shows the split between the polarities of the mystical and the grossly physical, with the preponderance on the latter. Walt Whitman’s phrase “the divine work of fatherhood” is a rare example of the first mode. The dysphemisms (which allude to the physicality of the act with gross directness) are far more numerous, including the current poke, stuff, screw , preceded by making the beast with two backs (notably used in Othello I i 116)